Contesting the French Revolution

The French Revolution is one of the great turning-points in modern history. Never before had the people of a large and populous country sought to remake their society on the basis of the principle of popular sovereignty. The drama, success and tragedy of their project, and of the attempts to arrest or reverse it, have attracted scholars to it for more than two centuries. Although right-wing journalists at the time of the bicentenary of 1989 rushed to proclaim that 'the French Revolution is finished', its importance and fascination for us are undiminished.

Ever since several thousand armed Parisians seized the Bastille fortress in Paris on 14 July 1789 people have debated the origins and meaning of what had happened. All have agreed on the unprecedented and momentous nature of the storming of the Bastille and associated acts of revolution in the months between May and October 1789. However, such were the consequences of these events that the debate on their origins shows no signs of concluding.

In the years after 1789 successive revolutionary governments sought to remake every aspect of life in accordance with what they understood to be the principles underpinning the Revolution of 1789. However, because there could not be agreement on the practical application of those principles, the question of to whose advantage the revolution should be quickly became a source of division, driving the Revolution in new directions. At the same time, powerful opponents of change inside and outside France forced governments to take measures to preserve the Revolution itself, culminating in the Terror of 1793-

This book considers the ways in which historians have contested the fundamental issues attaching to the Revolution. Why was there a Revolution in 1789? Why did it prove so difficult to stabilize the new regime? How might the Terror be explained? What were the consequences of a decade of revolutionary change? The book draws in particular on the great richness of historical writing of the past few decades, some of it part of the renewed debates at the time of the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1789, but much of it influenced by wider changes in approaches to the writing of history.